“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Jay Barbree on TV, a man who has covered the space program since the attempted launch of Vanguard in 1957. He was discussing the Orion launch, the so-called first step on the road to Mars. And the more he talked, the clearer it became he was pretty spacey himself.
They call this sort of thing institutional capture. For NBC, Barbree has covered every manned launch ever – Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Shuttles – and has obviously long ago lost any hint of objectivity about his beat. When offered Washington jobs he refused to leave Canaveral. He’s gone from reporter to Buzz Lightyear — “to infinity and beyond.”
When he said we’ve got to get out of this place, he didn’t mean he hoped the Orion would lift off or that the Mars mission would go forward. He meant the human race has to leave our doomed planet and conquer the stars. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to begin the process before it’s too late since the earth is eventually going to be uninhabitable.
When I was a child I thought as a child. More to the point I read Verne and Asimov and Blish and all the rest who promulgated this notion of men populating the solar system and then the galaxy. I really enjoyed the high romance of the notion. But even the Dean, Robert Heinlein who was always half engineer, had to do some serious special pleading to make such a notion plausible in books like “Methuselah’s Children.” First he set these great leaps into the beyond several centuries hence, then posited humans with life spans in the hundreds of years, light speed drives and other dei ex machina.
Back on earth, in reality, we are frail, short-lived mayflies with primitive technology who aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. There is no escape hatch so we had better spend out space cadet money taking better care of spaceship Earth. Our fragile planet is the only one we are going to get. Other planets in our vicinity are uninhabitable for creatures of our sort. We are stuck here.
The Mars mission would require voyagers to spend four years en route with no return ticket unless a purely hypothetical plasma drive could be developed. But this would be powered by a nuclear reactor in space. Even if it could be invented, supposedly reducing the trip to six months, getting it off the earth is fraught with peril. Orion was delayed due to a stuck valve, a space shuttle plunged to earth due to faulty O rings. One glitch in a rocket lifting the nuclear power plant and radioactive debris would come raining down on Earth. Hasn’t she been abused enough?
Assuming humans could get to Mars they would find themselves on an orb with an unbreathable atmosphere and a brutal climate ranging from 95 above to 150 below zero. So far there is no plausible explanation for how colonists would survive, what they would breathe, what they would eat. The crew would be signing on for a ride “through the mansions of glory in suicide machines.” And even if solutions could be designed, the cost of lifting sufficient gear to establish a colony would be astronomical. Fun for NASA employees, but should this decades long crap shoot be something tax dollars subsidize?
If all that weren’t objection enough, there are the physical hazards of space travel to consider. Muscle atrophy is a real issue on extended voyages. Radiation is a serious worry, threatening to give every crew member cancer. There is also some thought such a weightless, irradiated voyage could cause blindness. Not to mention the psychological effects of extended isolation. Fun to imagine our Martian invasion force stumbling blind, cancer-ridden and insane out of the airlock on the Red Planet.
Those who solicit funds to play with wonderful space toys pooh-pooh such worries. All we have to do is start on the journey and figure it out on the way, and all that requires is tax dollars. In an inversion of the immortal words of “The Right Stuff:” no bucks, no Buck Rogers. Needless to say, all the congressional districts with bases and contractors likely to dine on pork are gung-ho, from Huntsville, Alabama to the Jet Propulsion Lab in California, from sea to appropriating sea.
I’m all for increased science and research spending on how to live on earth for as long as it will support life, which is estimated at no less than another 500 million years unless we screw it up. How about spending our money on limiting population growth, using less power to do more, polluting less, preserving the land and water without which we might as well be on Mars?
I suspect the idea of selling Congress on research to allow us to live on Earth responsibly strikes the space dreamers as not very feasible. So they fantasize about an escape to greener pastures in the sky. Since humans are going to doom earth, we’ve got to get out of here before it’s too late. However, won’t the same greedy, fallible, short-sighted humans doom the next rock we manage to reach? The fault in not in our planet, nor in our starships but in ourselves.